Diablo III Interview

Gameplanet offers an interview with Diablo III’s game director Jay Wilson on the upcoming and much-anticipated hack’n’slash threequel in which we learn that the studio is working on making the game harder, post-launch plans, what would make the team consider Diablo III a success and more. Here’s a snip:

Gameplanet: What’s next for the development team, what’s happening post-launch?

Wilson: Sleep! Vacation for some of us! But the first thing is going to be our Player vs. Player [PvP] patch. We’re already working on that. There’ll probably be something we tend to plan a whole series of patches. We already have our (this is an emergency just in case something goes wrong-patch) that we put out this point. This is our (emergency balance-patch), that we put out at this point. Then we have our PvP patch that we’ll put out and it’ll also probably be our secondary balance patch.

Those are our focus right now. We are starting to talk about if we’ll do an expansion. We think the game might be successful now [and] warrant such a thing. But we’ll see! We also have a group internally that’s exploring console.

Gameplanet: So that brings up a couple of things: what goals, or what benchmarks do you personally hold that will need to be met in order to qualify this game as a success?

Wilson: We have mathematical numbers internally. Those are boring to me. I want us to hit them and I think we will because the game is good, and it’s not that I’m dismissing that the game’s got to make money but I think it’ll make money because it’s good, and we worry about that first.

So for me, if a community builds around it similar to the community that built around Diablo II, then I will feel like it’s a success. If that community is vibrant and wars with each other, and with us, and struggles and fights to make the game better, then to me that’s worth continuing to work on the game. That’s success.

Every company I’ve worked for before through no fault of their own when they finish a game, they’re done. Once the game is out the door, they really barely think about it again unless they do an expansion. Even so, if they do an expansion, that’s very expansion-centric, it’s not really looking back at the previous game.

Blizzard’s not like that. We look at the game shipping as the start date, that’s when the game really starts, and that’s when our work really starts, because now we can build a game in the best environment you can possibly build, which is with people playing it.